Quiet Bubble

High wire act

Finally, the rest of the world’s catching on. The Wire just got renewed for a fifth and probably final season. Slate’s editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg rightly calls it “the best TV show ever broadcast in America,” and uses his authority to start up a TV club devoted to the show. Since I don’t get HBO, it’ll be months before I see this season, so I’m staying away from the TV Club (and, boy, does that make me gnash my teeth… and almost make me break down and become a subscriber. Fight it, Walter, fight it). Somehow, I failed to notice that the House Next Door, hosted and corralled by film critic/filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz, ran absorbing features, character studies, and extended commentary about its treatment of race and politics all last week. (Check to the site’s right for its “On The Wire” section; note that the site will, like Slate, be hosting weekly commentary on the show. I wouldn’t miss it if you’re a first-time viewer, unless you don’t have HBO.) So, the show has reached critical mass; let’s hope it gets mass appeal, too.

Best show ever

I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it on this blog, but The Wire is, hands-down, the best show on television. It’s certainly the best police drama to ever appear on TV, in part because it’s so much more than a police drama that it falls outside of genre. Better than The Sopranos. Better than Deadwood. Better than Six Feet Under. Better than the triad of jittery, anxiety-ridden comedy–Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office. Better than The Simpsons in its heyday (and seasons three through five are hard to top, folks). Better, even, than Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In a long, wonderful ode to the show, Alan Sepinwall explains why the show’s so great:

Where most other dramas are content to include one or two minority cast members and puff out their chests about diversity, The Wire features literally dozens of interesting, significant roles for actors of color. Simon, ex-cop Ed Burns and their writing staff (which includes acclaimed crime novelists Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos) juggle what can seem like a hundred different subplots and pay them off in satisfying fashion at season’s end. They don’t tell you what to think of their characters, or even whom to agree with when characters debate morality, public policy and every problem plaguing urban America today. They just want you to think, period.

And...

Simon and Burns are both believers that the War on Drugs has now become more harmful than the drugs themselves, but their agenda transcends any one political ideology. What The Wire says, repeatedly, is that The System–government, business, law enforcement, everything that runs this country–is broken and that the guardians of The System are too committed to defending the status quo to even try fixing it. It’s not a case of corrupt or evil people choosing to ruin things for the rest of us; it’s people of all moral calibers making decisions within the established context of their own institutions (the police force, City Hall, drug corners) without regard to how they affect the world at large.

There’s more, much more. (And here’s a printer-friendly version.)

Champs

In Slate, Sam Anderson goes ga-ga for the first season of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, recently released on DVD:

When the animated series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist was canceled in 1999, its fans reacted with a natural hoarding instinct: They recorded the final marathons and braced themselves for a couple of Katz-less years. But scarcity soon turned to famine. While every other cartoon in the history of the world came out on DVD, Dr. Katz remained inexplicably locked in the Comedy Central vault. Ray Romano, Dr. Katz’s breakout guest star, passed through the entire sitcom life cycle: pilot, fame, reruns, DVD. Still no Dr. Katz. Fans got desperate. A grass-roots movement collected online signatures demanding a DVD. Bidding wars erupted on eBay over fuzzy home-recorded VHS versions of the complete series, then over even fuzzier DVDs copied from the VHS.

It’s clear that Dr. Katz indeed greatly influenced the TV sitcom—from the fantastic (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office) to the intermittently terrific (Life with Bonnie) to the just plain awful (Fat Actress). Its conversational stutters, false starts, overlaps, and interruptions paved the way for shows—such as the late, great Arrested Development—that used the patterns of real-life talk (and its awkward silences) as a source for laughs. Lots of stand-up comedians laid down on Katz’s couch—Jon Stewart, Wanda Sykes, and Dave Chappelle all appeared on the show; Sykes was a sort-of regular. Its casual approach—nothing much ever happens on Dr. Katz fit well into the 1990s zeitgeist. (See: Seinfeld, Friends, and every other New York-based sitcom from 1995-2000. And, god, there were a lot of them.) It’s hard to imagine the success of South Park’s limited, crude animation without Dr. Katz before it. Hell, they were both on the same channel.

It’s a shame that Dr. Katz wasn’t particularly funny. Anderson admits as much: “Though Dr. Katz rarely makes you laugh out loud, it will take you to a place that American comedy too often ignores: It will keep you blissfully suspended, for hours, on the edge of laughter.” Sorry, Sam, but I’d rather laugh.

And this has got me thinking about influence, and how much of an artwork’s greatness we can attribute to it. How do we define “great art?” The three criteria for greatness are: 1) aesthetic superiority; 2) commercial and/or critical popularity; and 3) influence on later artworks. Truly great artists—Michelangelo, the Beatles, John Coltrane, Jean Renoir, Mark Twain—seem to have all three traits in roughly equal proportions.

Here’s where this gets contentious. Take, for instance, Björk. I think she’s one of the most innovative musicians of the last 25 years, but I wonder if she’s great with a capital “G.” Certainly, her recordings are gorgeous, and she’s got a sizable cult of fans. But is she influential at all to other musicians? She seems to be sui generis, still, after over two decades of recording. I don’t see other pop stars doing what she does musically or even in her videos.

Or what about artists who were very popular with both audiences and critics during their lifetimes, but whose actual art wasn’t particularly great nor had lasting influence? The Pulitzer Prizes are littered with writers—Herman Wouk, James Gould Cozzens, Edna St. Vincent Millay—who were revered while they were alive, but who nobody reads now. Are these great artists?

Which leads us back to Dr. Katz. Can we call it a great show even though, aesthetically, it wasn’t usually that good? Its “Squigglevision” technique made me seasick after a while; its framing and compositions were uninteresting; the conversations fell flat more often than they floated. The plots weren’t tightly structured—if nothing else, Dr. Katz gives me even more appreciation for the mostly improvised Curb Your Enthusiasm, the episodes of which click together with decisive snaps.

Nevertheless, Dr. Katz was one of the shows that made it okay for American cartoons to be geared towards adults. Its gifts were honed and sharpened on later, better countless TV comedies, animated or not. Dr. Katz’s fans are what Malcolm Gladwell calls “early adopters,” people who latched onto a trend, a style, an aesthetic before the rest of the world caught up.

Or before the style got good enough to be worth latching on.

Of the three aforementioned criteria, I think #2 is the least important. Fashion fades; remember when Guns ‘N’ Roses was the biggest band in America? Critical attention ebbs and flows, too, which is why Faulkner only got the fame he deserved decades after his best stuff had been written. But popularity does give us a sense that an artist has his finger on the pulse of the culture, and that can’t be ignored.

Even this is suspect, though. Last weekend, I drove down to New Orleans for a 4th of July pleasure trip to that most un-American (and yet most American) of American cities. I blazed the deluxe version of Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend as I drove, and several things struck me. One, Girlfriend is one of the greatest rock albums of the last 15 years. Two, it’s great to drive to. Three, its mixture of gorgeous harmonies, squalling and grating guitars, and pop lyrics is a concoction that doesn’t seem dated at all.

Girlfriend came out in 1991, the same year as Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten. The year ushered in grunge. Sweet’s album shared some of the genre’s dynamics on the surface—it’s noisier than a cement mixer; it swings from forlorn to ecstatic in a heartbeat, and back again. But Girlfriend still believes in fantastic solos, clean production values, catchy tunes, and songs about love. It’s like Sonic Youth and the Beach Boys decided to make a record together, and the effect is an album that’s still startling and weird.

Now, Girlfriend was the most popular (and best) album Sweet’s produced. But its sales and critical attention paled in comparison to the Seattle juggernauts. But who says the word “grunge” without irony these days? Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Mudhoney, and the rest are barely listenable once you’re out of high school.

Girlfriend, meanwhile, sounds better every year. It’s the definition of a great pop record, of great art. But, unlike Dr. Katz, lots of Girlfriend’s influence has veered towards the bad. Gin Blossoms, Matchbox 20, No Doubt, and the Goo Goo Dolls all owe a great debt to Sweet, but we’re the ones who are having to pay. Girlfriend certainly meets criteria #1 and #2, but #3 if iffy.

Then again, what great piece hasn’t brought on lesser spirits? Dr. Katz works the opposite way—it’s a mediocre show that led to plenty of terrific ones. It’s a qualified greatness, but I’m feeling charitable.

The advent of TVD

Sam Anderson apparently lives his TV-watching life the way I do:

HBO’s recent evolution from a place where you could watch Strange Brew 12 times a day into a gushing fountainhead of televisual high art has made my life complicated. Though I’m an avid watcher of Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and Deadwood, subscribing has always seemed decadent and a little beside the point: I don’t want another channel, I just want the shows. This means that I live, by choice, in a permanent HBO-lag: My viewing occurs entirely on DVD, a year or two behind schedule. I’ve become the undisputed king of the obsolescent spoiler: While the culturally savvy are fretting over Tony Soprano’s coma, I’m telling people about the ducks leaving his pool in Season 1.

Part of the reason I’ve been absent from the airwaves this week is that I’m plowing through the first two seasons of The Wire (thank you, Netflix!). Anderson aptly refers to this phenomenon as “living in different cultural time zones.” It’s not so bad—I’m reading my first William T. Vollmann novel, and I’m not looking over my shoulder to see if anyone else is, too—but Anderson delineates the conversational problems that can erupt:

Six Feet was particularly tough to fall behind on: Though it was never the most subtle show, it might have been the most emotionally engaging. Its characters were realistically messy—constantly groping after some awkward species of adolescent vitality, locked into relationships teetering on the brink of murder-suicide—and it often took big risks (tortuous near-deaths, an occasional absence of likeability) that inspired lots of polarized public chatter. In those eight months, I began to feel like an aesthetic amputee, haunted by phantom pains of the missing season. I had to avoid certain Web sites, avert my eyes from the paper’s arts section, and walk away from potentially revelatory conversations. Inevitably, details leaked out: I heard rumors of a major character’s death and some kind of mind-blowing season-ending montage. My wife and I endured awkward silences.

This, folks, is my life, for both premium and regular TV. So, if you tell me how the final season of Arrested Development or the latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm went, I’m kicking your ass. Television is the medium that most Americans are fluent in, and where a significant portion of our watercooler talk and cultural references come from, so I feel like I’m always a step behind everyone else.

Mostly, this doesn’t bother me. But it does bring attention to a sort of social disconnect that TV viewers 20 years ago didn’t experience. Practically everyone wondered who shot J.R. Ewing. Practically everyone watched the last episode of M*A*S*H. Perhaps that’s not good—there are, after all, better ways of spending our time—but it did mean that TV was common culture, a lingua franca that we could all use to communicate. What does it say about us that, less than 30 years after everyone saw Princess Di get married (or at least had an opinion about it), our most common denominator as an art form is so splintered in its viewership?

I have no idea. I explored what Anderson calls “TVD”—watching TV shows as if we were reading (i.e. at our own paces, on our own schedules, with the freedom to move backwards, forwards, and zoom in at will)—last year. But I’m curious for other impressions. What are we losing by living in cultural time zones? Are we even doing so? And what might we be gaining?

My new show

I’m part of the problem—blame me.

You see, I watch, on average, four hours of television a week. It’s channel surfing, primarily, flicking from channel to channel until I get drowsy enough to fall asleep. Occasionally, I’ll rest on Turner Classic Movies for a while, if there’s a good silent movie on. If I really, really, really can’t sleep, I’ll find myself watching “Insomniac Movie Theater” on VH1 at 2 a.m., which is the only time that channel—or MTV—actually shows music videos any more. During the summer, I watch my Texas Rangers get slaughtered game after game until I can’t take it anymore (usually, about fifteen minutes). If there’s a multi-part documentary on that sounds interesting, I’ll make an effort to see it.

Mostly, though, it’s just flipping… if I bother to turn on the TV at all. I haven’t had a regular show—as in, one I make a point to watch or at least to tape—since I gave up on The West Wing in 2003. There’s several shows that I like—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Scrubs, reruns of The Chappelle Show, um, well, okay, there’s a few shows that I like. Sort of.

I’m not bragging. I’d just rather read.

Friends recommend shows to me but, by the time they do so, it’s midway through a season and I find myself confused and bored halfway through an episode. Or friends will hoist so much acclaim on a show that it buckles under the weight. (Freaks and Geeks, I’m looking at you. Entourage, why does everyone love you so? And, Buffy, don’t you even try to hide…) If I happen to love an episode of a show, I’ll wait for a season’s worth of episodes to be put on DVD rather than watch them as they arrive.

Like I said, I’m part of the problem. I’m that guy who says how much he likes certain shows, but who is actually detrimental to their staying on the air. I laughed maniacally at the entire first season of Arrested Development, and will buy the second season’s box set as soon as it appears. But I haven’t been watching it as it airs. I’ll be the first to champion Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I’m too cheap to spring for HBO, so I hope Larry David isn’t depending on me to keep his show alive. I’ve seen more episodes of Futurama after it was collected onto DVD than I did when it was originally broadcast. So, you should take it with a grain—or perhaps a large handful—of salt when I recommend a new show.

Double your pleasure... or whatever

Today features a review of the first two seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Have a good weekend, folks.

If you had videotaped me watching the first ten episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it would’ve looked like I was watching a particularly great horror movie—wary eyes peeking out from between rigid fingers, grimace on my face, knees squeezed together, laughing so maniacally that it’s obvious I’m doing so in self-defense. And you’d be half right. Each episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which David plays an exaggeration (I hope so, anyway) of himself as a rich comedy writer in Los Angeles, is like watching a bloody train wreck in slow-motion—you know how awful it’s about to become, but you’re powerless to stop it.

David is a caustic man without tact, who constantly finds himself in awkward social situations that are usually caused, at least in part, by his own ineptitude and acerbity. It’s the funniest show I’ve seen on television since Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. It’s certainly funnier than Seinfeld, which David co-created. Built upon improvised scenarios, CYE’s conversations fly by the seat of their pants; its overlapping subplots weave themselves together in startling, hilarious ways; and its technical messiness is somehow endearing.

The episodes both start and end in media res, as if the directors are cutting snippets from David’s life. Each scene is shot in seven or eight takes, and then the best parts of each take are indeed cut-and-pasted together to form a coherent scene. This jumpy editing—combined with the fact that it’s shot on handheld, digital video cameras—gives the series an antic, nervous cinematic sense. The show deals with the same issues as Seinfeld—the vagaries of everyday social interactions, the potentials for dangerous miscommunication in even the most minor affairs, sexual and romantic politics—but CYE is angrier, more anxious, and, most importantly, more cinematic. The DV cameras and innovative editing give the show more freedom than the theatrical lighting and stationary camera of most sitcoms.

This freedom is wonderfully hazardous. Despite all the warning signs, and we always know Larry’s gonna get himself in trouble, CYE is constantly surprising. When his wife’s family asks him to publish an obituary for a departed aunt, we know it’ll end badly. We can’t imagine that the newspaper would ever publish it beginning with the phrase “Louise Hoenin, charitable mother, beloved”—well, substitute the “a” for another letter. Things go downhill from there.

The fact that he’s allowed to frequently screw up—and not in cute, easily solvable family-comedy ways—is what differentiates CYE from Everybody Loves Raymond. Because we see things from Larry’s point-of-view, we see the disconnection between how he perceives himself (as the woe-begotten, sharp-as-a-tack mensch) and how he really is (an off-putting, selfish jerk). At his core, he’s got dignity—he almost always says what he means, usually when it’s wildly inappropriate; he can’t lie to his wife (even when he desperately wants to); he generally starts things off trying to do right by people (and failing miserably). Because we see both his emotional core and how it gets transmitted to the rest of the world, we both sympathize with and are repelled by him. In short, you can see why his wife (played by improv-comedy veteran Cheryl Hines) loves him, but also why she spends so much time imagining him on a torture rack.

For their interactions alone, it’s worth the price of admission. The show captures the aimless talks, curdling pseudo-arguments, and resignation that are part of every long-term relationship. Helped along by cinematic techniques that are as jittery and nervewracking as its characters and conversations, CYE is comedy that makes you seasick. You’re laughing hysterically while ducking for cover.

Brothers gonna work it out (maybe)

A Huey P. Newton Story started out as a stage written and performed by Roger Guenveur Smith, one of the most dynamic American actors working today, for a Philadelphia theatrical festival. Spike Lee recorded one of Smith’s performances for TV. I first saw it on public television a year ago, and try to revisit it every year.

Spike Lee’s A Huey P. Newton Story (2001) is so antsy and electric that it threatens to fly apart at any and every second. Roger Guenveur Smith plays Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton as a radical philosopher whose mouth moves almost as quickly as his mind, and who rushes headlong through political commentary, cultural allusions, family life, and downhome wit. For the first ten minutes, I held onto the movie for dear life, hoping the breakneck speed would dissipate.

It doesn’t, quite. The film (well, digital video) moves in lurches and lunges. Mostly, this tactic works, adding poignancy to scenes and interrupting rhythms at the most acute, painful points. Smith’s performance is brilliant, punctuating every thought with the puff of a cigarette (He goes through two packs of Kool menthols in this 90-minute movie.), and director Lee is merely playing catch-up with the actor. Lee’s editing moves as fast as Smith’s motormouth and, like Newton with his allusions, Lee peppers the movie with documentary footage, music, and sound effects.

Although there were revelations about the Black Panther Party throughout the movie, A Huey P. Newton Story never feels didactic. It’s not a history lesson, but a riveting character study of a heroic man caged in by demons both external (racism) and internal (drug addiction). Much of this credit belongs to Lee and his crew. Lee usually works best when working with a broad canvas—multiple plot strands, lots of characters, cultural commentary coming at you from all sides. He can’t keep myself from making political points in his movies, from making broader commentary, even if the ideas are half-cooked or if they don’t fit the dimensions of the film he’s making at the time. He crams, as if he’s got to stuff every single thing he’s thinking about into whatever project he’s working on. For that reason, his large-scope films (Do the Right Thing, Summer of Sam, Jungle Fever, Get On the Bus), where he’s got room to stretch out, are better than his often abysmal character studies (Crooklyn, Girl 6, Mo’ Betta Blues).

In A Huey P. Newton Story, however, his approach works amazingly well, because his cinematic approach reflects Smith’s characterization of Newton. In the movie, which is a recording of a live theatrical performance, Newton spends most of his time sitting in a chair, itching to stretch his legs, talking about his angry life and times. He’s stuck on a small stage, surrounded on all sides by fencing. He’s trapped, but his mind is constantly struggling against his constraints, making wild jokes and weird digressions that hone in on sharp points when you least expect it.

Lee’s cinema mirrors Smith’s acting. Lee is caged in, too, by the theatrical structure, but it’s his attempts to break free that are most engaging—and most encouraging for his growth as a filmmaker. He gets to create a barrage of ideas and imagery, as always, but finally does it through a character and setting that are perfectly attuned to his spirit.

(Come to think of it, Lee’s most vibrant recent film was 2000’s The Original Kings of Comedy, a live recording of a stand-up comedy tour. Other people got to do most of the talking there, too—and it was also stagebound.)

Finally, Newton ends up letting someone else do the talking as well. The movie’s penultimate lines are the “sound and fury” lines from act 5, scene 5 of Macbeth. They are as glorious and unsettling here as they are in Shakespeare’s play. The quote underscores one of the movie’s major points—for all the black radicalism in Newton’s soul, Shakespeare and Plato constituted his intellectual development as much as Malcolm X did. And for all the antagonism against white folks, Newton’s anxieties—namely, the feeling of being trapped inside a life you didn’t entirely make for yourself—are those of every white person in the theater audience as well. We are Huey P. Newton, and Huey P. Newton is us.

I ♥ The Office (Part 2)

And so we continue our week in television, with a review of the second series of The Office. See here for part 1.

Sadder and darker than the first series, the second series of The Office is so embarrassingly funny that I had to repeatedly pause the DVD, both to laugh and to stop myself from shaking. The show dares to go deeper into the psyche of office manager David Brent (Ricky Gervais), who is revealed to be a pathetic, lonely man. We already knew this from the first series, but it’s excruciating to watch as he discovers it as well. In one episode, he gives a rambling, god-awful motivational speech, complete with shaking his beerbelly to bad techno, ostensibly to pump the crowd up. The sequence ends entirely without applause. In another episode, he proves his inability to dance, at length, to a roomful of coworkers. He gets told off by an intern that he wants to sleep with, in front of his entire staff of underlings.

As his meltdown approaches, the camera catches more flashes of the anger underneath his giddy façade than we’ve been allowed to see previously. When he inevitably gets fired (I’m not giving away any surprises—the name of his bad ex-band, “Foregone Conclusion,” tells us all we need to know.), he gets tearful. Dressed in a hilarious chicken outfit, he’s unable to summon up a single laugh for himself.

Gervais is so brilliant that it’s unnerving. He pushes David’s dawning self-awareness so gradually and convincingly that we feel sorrowful for him, even as we realize that he absolutely, positively deserves to be fired. The character finally sees himself through the eyes of others, and finds out that there’s almost nothing to like.

This is depressing stuff, all the more depressing because we’re laughing maniacally at all of it. The office antics become more charged and tense when a new, handsome, popular boss arrives. Neil (Patrick Baladi) is confident, and an actual advocate for his workers. This puts him two legs up from David. Neil gamely dances with Rachel (Stacey Roca) to Bee Gees songs for charity. He gets things done, on time, and with respect for his immediate underlings.

So why don’t we like Neil more? Perhaps it’s because he’s entirely without foibles, which makes him seem alien when set against the rest of the all-too-flawed cast. The most humanly flawed character—because sometimes David seems too outlandish to be real—is Tim (Martin Freeman). Freeman proves himself a deadpan comedian without peer—he gets uproarious guffaws from blinks, blank stares, and minute changes in expression. The Office is most funny when it creates scenes of unintentional humor amongst its characters. Tim, however, is a real wit—he’s the only character acknowledged by others as being funny. Neil has perfect teeth and a perfect chin, but it’s Tim, with his bad haircut and dry cracks, who we root for.

So it’s especially painful to watch him turn down a promotion because he doesn’t have the self-confidence to take it with pride; or to watch him get turned down by the woman he loves; or to watch walk away from a smart, sexy girl who’s crazy about him. Tim, like everyone else in the show and like everyone I know, justifies his behavior to himself with malarkey that even he doesn’t believe. By the end of the show, almost everyone has turned against (if only for a moment) the bullshit that they shove down their own throats. The rebellion itself is cathartic and hilarious. The fact that it does little good, however, is humiliating and oppressive. That clutch at your throat as you’re laughing? It’s called suffocation.

Best reality show on television

Okay, it originally aired four years ago, it’s won an Emmy, lots of critics (justifiably) think it’s one of the best shows ever produced for television, and it’s already spawned a weak-kneed American version. So, I’m late to the ballgame. Fine. I love The Office anyway, and here’s why.

If there’s one thing television does better than cinema, it’s the portrayal of work life. By offering its art in serial form, television shows allow us to watch how the day-by-day small progressions of workaday life actually build—or stubbornly refuse to build—into actual moments and eras of significance. A feature film condenses life into its defining moments, its brightest spots and darkest places. Movies portray the news. A serialized TV show, at its best, can do precisely the opposite, portraying the everyday happenings that, by dint of being everyday happenings, are by definition not news.

The Office—a show about the sad, sad lives of office workers in a dreary town (Slough; the name is brilliant) for a dreary paper supply company—is dazzling; Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s creation justifies the medium and foregrounds its possibilities. The concept is not so much simple as it is perfect—a silent TV crew documents the exploits of the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg Paper Company, presumably for either a reality TV show or a training exercise. The branch is run by David Brent (Gervais), a inept boss who barely contains his racist and sexist tendencies, and who doesn’t contain his ego at all. He’s oddly pompous—he blows himself out of proportion by putting on a nice-guy, friendly-jokester act for the camera. So he’s most pompous when he’s eager to portray himself as a man of the people. He’s got no sense that he’s an asshole, nor that his underlings only laugh at his jokes to keep on his good side. He undermines the confidence and efficiency of everyone he works with; he unsettles everyone with his embarrassingly inappropriate comments; he’s constantly getting caught in lies and being proven inept. Everyone around him knows it, which is the source of most of The Office’s dry, mordant comedy.

But everyone also knows that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can done about it, which is the source of the show’s tragic undercurrents. From the naturalistic light—dull grays, fluorescent lighting scheme, perpetually overcast weather—to the dry wit, The Office captures how work can be mind-numbing and infuriating all at once. The show’s best relationship is between Tim (the smashingly droll Martin Freeman) and his nemesis Gareth (uptight, frightening Mackenzie Crook). The two work side by side, and hate each other. Their mutual derision comes not from overblown circumstances (although there are some of those, such as Tim’s perpetual burying of Gareth’s office supplies in Jello, or Gareth’s violent fantasies), but from the run-of-the-mill annoyances that build up as time goes on. Gervais and Merchant get lots of mileage from the fact that Gareth can say things so wildly inappropriate that you think you’ve entered the Twilight Zone. And, just when you think he can’t possibly top himself, he does.

Character quirks snowball over the course of the series’ six episodes, heightening the tension (ahem, hilarity) to small, acute breaking points. The Office’s foibles draw guffaws because they’re so muted, so rooted in sly glances, opened mouths of disbelief, and offhand quips. The cinema verité camerawork and editing works like an eavesdropper, so that we feel embarrassed and uncomfortable watching this stuff. In particular, the casual sexism is hard to watch. The women, generally, hold up better than the men—they’re more mature, more resourceful, and yet sadly more resigned to dealing with untoward advances and bad jokes at their expense. The Office captures the casual sexist cruelty of practically every office place and how it can’t just be eliminated by legislation alone.

By the end of the sadly hysterical series, we’ve watched people lose their jobs, their holds of sanity, and their dignity. Gareth’s distraught tears almost make us sorry for him, even as we’re chuckling. Tim’s fumbled flirtation with Dawn (Lucy Davis) rings true because it’s so awkward and poorly conceived. And, in the most authentic note of all, only David is blithely untouched by the end. He goes on to a ridiculously undeserved promotion with his feral, maniacally idiotic smile intact. I’d never want to work at Wernham Hogg, but it’s a helluva place to watch.

Come to think of it, in some ways The Office IS news, in that it offers us a honest portrayal of workplace life that’s so rarely seen otherwise. It makes The Apprentice look like the complete nonsense that it is.